Monitoring silence in your Azure Service Bus Queues

Published: July 25, 2018

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Are you not aware of a situation where no messages are flowing in your Queue/Topic?

It is very simple to configure and get alerted to this situation with Serverless360 Data Monitoring.

The flow of messages in your entities is of prime importance when you use Queues or Topic Subscription in your integration architecture. Messages flow at a different rate in the system. Sometimes, publishers generate messages at a faster rate, there may be an orchestration or workflow processing a batch of messages that push them back to the system. There will be a flurry of messages, during certain period there will be a huge volume of messages passing through and at times there are no messages at all. Whatever be the case, setting up appropriate monitoring will help to watch your system for any abnormalities. For instance, if there are any unexpected scenario to occur, you need to be notified so that you can take a look at the respective entities and take corrective actions in your system.

In this document, let us discuss a scenario where you need to be notified when there is no message flowing through your entity either a Queue or a Topic for a specific period of time, in other words, if your Queue is silent for, say 15 minutes. This may be because your publishing applications are not sending messages to the entity or there is a different problem that you will fix as soon as you come to know about this situation.

Serverless360 Data Monitoring

This is exactly the reason, we have built Serverless360 Data Monitoring. Entities can be monitored based on certain metrics within a specified time window. This will help you to check if your entity or system keeps up with your business SLA.

In Serverless360, you can create a data monitor to check the following metrics:

Incoming Messages – set Warning < 5 & Error < 1

Outgoing Messages – set Warning < 5 & Error < 1

Note: It is an OR logic implementation. If any of the metric configurations fails, it will forward the alert.

And check if there is any flow of messages (inbound or outbound) for every 15 minutes.

Based on the above configuration, Serverless360 will monitor the ingress and egress of messages to your queue every 15 minutes and if there are less than 5 messages flowing, it will forward a warning alert and if there are no messages moved in the 15-minute window, it will forward an error alert.

For more reading on Serverless360 Data Monitoring capability, refer to this document.